Document Processing Systems

Algorithmic manipulation of symbolic documents has been a core capability of Mathematica since the mid-1990s. Widely used within Mathematica itself, it has made possible an expanding series of large-scale document processing projects—not least nearly a million pages of content on Wolfram Research's own prominent websites.

Mathematica is a unique bridge between documents and algorithmic computation. With its fundamentally symbolic architecture, it handles structured documents just like any other data, using both its vast network of built-in algorithms and its unique symbolic language, which integrates rule-based, pattern-based, functional, string-based and other programming paradigms.

With the ability to import and export hundreds of document, web, graphics, data and other formats, Mathematica can automatically extract relevant elements, process and analyze them, then use its built-in typesetting, layout, visualization and interface-building capabilities to programmatically create final static or dynamic content. Tightly integrated with both XML and external databases, and with support for modern distributed computing, Mathematica makes possible a major new level of document processing—allowing not only content and format transformations, but also full algorithmic analysis and processing of text and structure. With its immediate ability to call on sophisticated algorithms, Mathematica also makes possible new kinds of automated project management and document quality assurance that greatly enhance the efficiency of large-scale document processing projects.